Thursday, January 19, 2012

Down and Out and Proud in Cairo

“The
Café of Mirrors seemed to be a place created by man’s wisdom and set within the
confines of a world doomed to sadness.” [photograph of Cairo’s Al Fishwary
Café, a.k.a. the Café of Mirrors, by Hamad AlSarraf, used with his kind
permission. More of Hamad AlSarraf’s photographs may be viewed at:http://www.hamadalsarraf.com/]

Egyptian-French writer Albert
Cossery’s 1955 novel Mendiants et Orgueilleux commences with a scene
unforgettable in its combination of squalor, grotesquerie, and gallows humor. One
of Cossery’s principal characters, Gohar, is awakened in his derelict Cairo
apartment by water swirling about the newspapers on which he makes his bed. When
he at last identifies its source, it’s as though the water itself has
metastasized into a symbol of the impoverished, sordid existence he leads and
of the proximity of death. Not that he cares much, for the chief thing on his
mind once he’s out in the deluge of activity in the streets is to find, as
quickly as possible, his hashish dealer.

That the novel begins with
a literal awakening is both an elegant literary device and perhaps a kind of
joke, as wakefulness, for Cossery’s characters, is but a state where dreams and
reality overlap. With a slightly somnambulant quality, his figures move through
the world according to their needs, at times scarcely cognizant of a difference
in value between life and death, alive to what’s around them yet each
possessing a dream for a better future he perhaps knows that he’ll never
attain. Yet within this conflicted space between dream and resignation, a fierce
sense of pride and a constitutional determination to live free from the constraints
of codes, laws, and material trappings exerts itself. Cossery’s “proud beggars”
(the title chosen fora recently republished English translation) include
Gohar, former professor and now ragged street poet; his supplier of daily hashish,
the supplicating, scheming Yeghen; and their acquaintance El Kordi, a government
functionary and sort of dandy whose vaguely revolutionary aspirations take a
back seat to his love for a prostitute at the brothel to which all three are
linked. It is here where the motiveless murder of another young prostitute
has set in motion an inquiry, led by Cossery’s fourth main character, the
depressive homosexual detective Nour El Dine.

While there’s a murder
investigation in Mendiants et Orgueilleux, Cossery displays little
interest in toying with the detective genre, or in any kind of literary gaming,
for that matter. Sure, there’s a murder, but it’s practically incidental to the
story, particularly since neither the killer - whose identity we know already from
witnessing the murder - nor his companions seem to see anything terribly
regrettable about the crime, with the inefficacy and moral vacuity of the
police exposed as an even worse sort of indifference. Both crime and
investigation seem an almost negligible, perfunctory set of events in this
atmosphere of indifference and insolence, a minor and disposable tragedy in a
world of more monstrous crimes that now possesses even the power to destroy itself - that one inhabits the lower depths of Cairo’s back alleys doesn’t
prevent one from recognizing the criminality of the atomic bomb. And Mendiants
et Orgueilleux is most certainly a novel of the lower depths, its pages populated
with the poor and afflicted, from listless prostitutes to street children
scrounging discarded cigarette butts, from a one-eyed policeman to a legless, armless
beggar whose wife is jealous of other women given the earnings such a wretched
state can bring in from the man’s solicitations.

As immediately evident
in the arresting opening pages, Cossery’s sense of how to set up a scene is pitch
perfect. Introducing his principal characters one by one in more or less
separate scenes that unfold like set pieces, Cossery then brings them together
in a culminating rendezvous in which the values of the street collide and
co-mingle with those of authority in a black comedy quite literally of manners,
since the extreme politesse of the
meeting only amplifies its absurdity. Nour El Dine – sharing tea with his prime
suspects in Cairo’s famous Café of Mirrors – finds his view of the world as
something to be ordered coming up against beings who simply refuse to
participate “in the destiny of the civilized world,” in any order whatsoever other
than the exigencies of their needs and their dignity. The policeman is
dumbfounded, for instance, at their suggestion that he dispatch his task by simply
arresting one of them who has willingly admitted to the crime but who is
clearly not the guilty party (the question of guilt or innocence seeming of
little relevance). They take a polite but distinct pleasure in mocking the
officer’s incomprehension and adherence to proper procedure:

“Does
a motiveless crime fall under the purview of the law? Isn’t it essentially the
same as an earthquake, for example?

“But
man has become a misfortune to himself,” replied Gohar. “Man has become worse
than an earthquake. In any case, he does more damage. Don’t you believe, Mr.
Officer, that man has, for quite some time now, surpassed in horror the
cataclysms of nature?”

“Then
you’re paid to do nothing,” said Yeghen, “Since, to me, arresting the murderer
of a prostitute seems nothing compared to being able to stop the bomb.”

Despite these memorable
characters, the real star of Mendiants et Orgueilleux is Cairo itself,
which Cossery indulges with rich, unflinching description. There’s a gravitational pull in nearly all
of Cossery's scenes towards the street, as though the crowded alleys and trams
and sidewalks were dense, inescapable black holes into which the characters were
involuntarily drawn again and again. These repeated sorties among the crowds
seem to serve as entr’actes between Cossery’s set pieces, plunging the reader
into the coarse, animated world of Cairo through palpable
sensational touches: the odor of rancid onions on a woman in a tramway; the
dry, mealy texture of pastries in a cheap patisserie; the cracked facades of
storefronts; shadows in the maze of alleys. One is acutely conscious of the
city pressing in and down on the populace, though not in quite the way one
might imagine: despite abundant misery and the daily struggle to survive,
Cairo’s streets hum and buzz with life and even a kind of joy squeezed from
this jostling crush of humanity.

Amid this raw human cacophony,
Cossery’s proud beggars find a degree of comfort shocking to bourgeois,
materialist standards. They take their impertinent position in the lower depths
as a point of pride and as insubordination to authority, which itself is
portrayed as arbitrary and brutal, morally and spiritually vacant, devoid of
the rich philosophy of the street. Rather than coming across as in any way
polemical, this anti-authoritarian contempt reveals itself through the poetic wit
(and street wits) of Cossery’s characters, whose indifference to power serves
to undermine it. The strength of this subversion comes in part from Cossery’s
refusal to reduce his characters to simple tropes: for all that Nour El Dine
represents as an institutional foil to the others’ carefree defiance, he’s
nonetheless a complex, even sympathetic character whose human faults plague him
in much the same way that they seem to liberate others.

The novel’s final pages
include a scene in which a simple gesture of humanity mixes compassion with abjection
to produce the kind of pointed moral clarity one sees in Flaubert’s “The Legend
of Saint Julian Hospitator” when Julian crawls into bed with a horrifically
afflicted dying leper. In the simple, matter-of-fact acceptance with which an unrepentant
murderer administers aid to one of humanity’s most unfortunate members while one
whose very job it is, ostensibly, to provide service and protection, looks on
in horror and revulsion, Cossery delivers a caustic attack on the guardians of
moral order - scoundrels all - who serve little more than “injustice and
shadows” and a system designed to mask simple truths about power. But as
Cossery suggests in this exceptionally rich, inimitable, ebullient, seamy,
blackly funny and proudly democratic novel, even scoundrels wielding power are
intractably stuck in the essential humanness with which we are all blessed and condemned.

Many French people I know have never heard of Cossery. One of them asked to have a look at Mendiants et Orgueilleux while I was reading it and then refused to give it back. He has that kind of effect. I've already started another of his works and plan to read them all.